My favorite reader of this blog, Gnome de Pluehm, sent me the most fabulous link this morning to a blog called, “Art Vent”, written by Carol Diehl, in which she critiques the language of the labels at the Whitney Biennale. This reminds me of my, “Scintillating Art Dialogue”, post which includes actual lines from my favorite movie, “I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing”.

Actually, the text pasted below makes the faux convoluted dialog from the movie seem almost commonplace. And reading this label text makes me think of literary plumage which makes me think of human plumage which makes me think of fashion!

Carol’s blog (and post) is a great read and I am quoting some of her quotes below. But you should really read her post. And regularly read her blog.

And I will illustrate this post born of her post born of crazyass label text using fashion!, for what better way to take this artspeak ensemble down the art loftified runway it seems to so crave, so to speak, than fashion!

[Disclaimer–Being a differently-abled, “writer”, and abstract punctuationist, I wish to assert that I am not critiquing the writing in the labels but am merely rejoicing in Carol’s estimation of such. I am not a credentialed anything.]

I fixed the saturation in the images to better illustrate the writing and the fashion! Yes–I keep adding an exclamation point after the word fashion!, because these images are not of fashion: or of fashion~. No.

At first glance they, like the text, might call to mind question marks but my charwoman and I (now) agree that they really need exclamation points. I voted for semicolons and tildes but got overruled.

…invents puzzles out of non sequiturs to seek congruence in seemingly incongruous situations, whether visual or spatial…inhabits those interstitial spaces between understanding and confusion… (Trinie Dalton on Amanda Ross-Ho)

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…Thomson’s inherently conversational practice both gamely Pop-ifies its often antiaesthetic historical precedents and resituates that generation’s thought experiments in the social realm. (Suzanne Hudson on Mungo Thomson)

——————–…features dozens of strips of junk mail spliced together and “stacked” in two zigzagging towers as if piled atop a desk: it is a conflation of art space and work space whose subtle allusion to the increasing corporatism of the art world is tempered by its intricate polychromatic delicacy…. (Lisa Turvey on Frances Stark)

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… Bove’s “settings” draw on the style, and substance, of certain time-specific materials to resuscitate their referential possibilities, to pull them out of historical stasis and return them to active symbolic duty, where new adjacencies might reactivate latent meanings.” (Jeffrey Kastner on Carol Bove)
——————–…creates space for the articulation of intention….(Suzanne Hudson on MK Guth)
——————–…. This early work’s active impediment of a unified spectatorial vantage point has led the artist to investigate, in his words, “a variegated relationship between painting—a practice whose ossified discursive and speculative value I want to mark with its various economic and technical support systems—and the contradictions of discursive engagements that subsist largely outside the site of display, but which are value-producing sites nonetheless.”…. (Suzanne Hudson on Cheney Thompson)

Blah,Blah,BLAH! Who reads labels anyway? People complain that the text is too small anyway.Writers,critics,curators,
politicians talk too much.Ever write a grant? Way too much to say and for what, so the committee can talk about why
you will not get the funding. Cell phones? What is everybody talking about? Not much. Meetings? My left leg
just got talked off. Do you know the 12 step program for
people who talk alot? ON and On Anon. Enjoy the art and
shut up.